Cherry Wrote:
> > The objection is not to the WIKI part of it -- the objection is to
> > yet-another-central-depository.
> >
> > The objection is not to the LDS doing it -- the objection is to
> > yet-another-central-depository.
> >
> > The object is not to whether this is better'n that -- the objection
> > is to yet-another-central-depository.
> >
> > Again -- the objection is to yet-another-central-depository.
> >
> <snip>
> >
> > You only need ONE place that tells you the vital records for Podunk
> > County Redneck State are in Whither Fork, or that 90+% of the 1890
> > census burnt in an office building in DC.
Good. The point is that the problem you are concerned with has
nothing to do with Wiki's per se, but is a concern on your part
about how genealogy is done on the web.
As it happens I agree with Ian on this. Duplication of information
is not bad at all. Ian focused on the advantages of preservation
when duplicate repositories were in place. Obviously the example he
gave fits that circumstance. I'm not sure its equally valid for the
web, since backup's, at least for large sites, are usually broadly
distributed geographically, and a disaster is unlikely to destroy
all the backups. Nonetheless, I can point to archives that have had
only a single backup, and that backup was lost. Happened in a
specific intance with a major genealogy provider.
There are, however, lots of other reasons why duplication is a good
thing. In particular, most of the duplication that you see,
especially at the scale of major genealogy services, is probably
driven by someone seeing a better way to do things. That could be
simply better site layout, or it could be something more intrinsic,
like how the information is captured, stored, and then served up to
the public.
An example of that lies with the US Census records. In
longtimeago-time USGENWEB came up with the nifty idea of having
voluteers transcribe the US census records. That project made great
strides, but its still far from complete---seems like that's been
going on close to ten years and they are still plugging away at it.
In the meantime Ancestry decided they could pay folks to transcribe
those same records. Very time consuming, very expensive....but the
ancestry project is done and the census are available (to
subscribers). To be sure, the product of the GenWeb effort is free,
and you have to subscribe to ancestry, but a basic subscription to
ancestry is relatively cheap (less than my internet service
providers charges), and its a complete data set. I might be able to
find what I want on USGenWeb, but probably not. They've got a long
way to go.
So I suppose your reasoning is to get rid of the USGenWeb census
project---incomplete though it is, it was still first little boy in
the classroom, so I guess it gets priority. No?
Unless of course, you think its Ancestry's census project that
should go. In which case you're advocating the destruction of a
truly valuable resource.
But in truth, I don't mind having the two things out there
duplicating each other. And of course there are other services and
places that have ****tions of the census records available. LDS, for
example, but there are others.
And that duplication serves a very worthwhile purpose---Sometimes
those busy bees at ancestry do botch a transcription---can't read a
name, or something of the sort. You can always check the images
yourself if there's a need, but I sort of like to go to the other
census transcription projects and check to see what they have.
Sometimes I'm in luck and its duplicated---then I can see if they
had the same problem as ancestry. Sometimes ancestry does the
better job, sometimes its somebody else. But the point is that this
is helpful.
Then there's the aspect of "a better idea". Sometimes the first kid
up doesn't really have a very good idea about how to present things.
The Rootsweb message boards have elements that I think are ill
thought through. The GenForum counter part works much better I
think is several respects. But if only Rootsweb was allowed to do
that job, we'd be pretty much stuck with whatever they gave us---I
personally would much rather work the GenForum message boards, but
perhaps that's a matter of taste. But I do have a choice. Choice
is good.
Old chinese saying "let a thousand flowers bloom". Some of those
flowers are going to be prettier than others, and those are the ones
you harvest.
Q
Q <quolla6@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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